Nasa - the Tool for Change

Drew Steiner

February 16, 2017

AP US History

NASA

NASA The Tool For Change

The focus on space exploration to keep pace with Russia and the necessity to address the battle for civil rights happened concurrently. President John F. Kennedy was forced to address the Soviets’ race to space and the decades of discrimination, violence, and cruelty towards African Americans. Kennedy appointed his vice-president, Lyndon B. Johnson, as chief of the National Space Council and the Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. Johnson, a southerner, contended that there was a direct relationship between deep poverty and discrimination. He sincerely believed that through job creation, destitution would decline and segregation would diminish. Subsequently, he and President Kennedy used federal equal employment laws to pressure the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “NASA”, an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government, to hire African American workers for a multitude of newly created jobs in the South. The opportunities to work as technicians, researchers, mathematicians, engineers, and astronauts had a deeply profound effect on advancing the rights for African Americans and altering the South’s social landscape.

NASA had over two hundred thousand jobs to fill and its contractors were required to include African Americans. As a result, upper-level job openings that were previously unavailable were now accessible to blacks. In fact, job equality at NASA preceded the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that mandated equal employment opportunity for all. Of course, it was not an easy undertaking to find and convince qualified blacks to relocate to the racially intolerant South. An Alabama contractors group engaged Charlie Smoot, the first black recruiter, to travel countrywide to urge talented engineers, mathematicians, and scientists to accept the space related jobs. NASA invited the presidents of black colleges to Huntsville in 1963 and established the agency’s college Co-Op program for blacks (NPR). Since NASA had a white only training program another one was created.

While African Americans were recruited to fill the thousands of new jobs in the South, they were not welcomed with open arms. For example, Ku Klux Klansmen at Cape Canaveral would not recognize or even speak to highly skilled engineer Julius Montgomery, future founder of Florida Institute of Technology The film, Hidden Figures, accurately depicts bathroom and coffee area segregation, and unfounded mistreatment of blacks by police. However, these men and women did not dwell on the racist environment; they adhered to a strong work ethic, took advantage of their new civil liberties, and paved the way for more African American participation in education, occupation, and government.